SOURCE: Magalaner, Marvin. “Louise Erdrich: Of Cars, Time, and the River.” In American Woman Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, pp. 95-108. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

In the following essay, Magalaner maintains that Erdrich's primary focus in Love Medicine is on her characters and their relationships within the Turtle Mountain community.

Love Medicine marks a new approach to the treatment of the American Indian in fiction. Louise Erdrich's Chippewa families on a twentieth-century reservation in the West bear no resemblance to the solemn “braves and squaws” of cowboy and Indian days. There's not a horse in the novel, not a peace pipe, and only a brief reference to nonfunctioning tribal gods. Where there is religion, it is Catholic; where there is hunting, it is by white police seeking Indian escapees from prison; where there is violence, it is from Indian family squabbles...